In an article in the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh, columnist Fares bin Hazam reports that both preachers in mosques and online propaganda are inciting young Muslims to wage jihad. [1] An interview with a young Muslim who went to fight in Afghanistan, also in Al-Riyadh, provides first-hand testimony confirming this claim.

The following are excerpts from the article and the interview:

Bin Hazam writes in his article: “The business with Afghanistan will never end as long as the ‘duty of jihad’ continues to live in [our] society, in mosques, in Friday [sermons], and on the Internet…

“After the fall of the Taliban and the subsequent Guantanamo crisis… there was increasing talk about the need to investigate our youth’s growing [inclination] towards jihad, and about the need to search for the reasons that motivate them to go to Afghanistan and to other countries…

“The call to investigate these reasons is despicable; it is a tasteless joke. [One might think] that the reasons are unknown, that we are not aware of our situation [and need to conduct an] investigation in order to discover why [our young people] went forth and are still going forth [to wage jihad]… The reasons are obvious. Many of us know them, and there is no need for a scientific study or for any other [kind of study] to reveal them…

“Since the causes are known, do we lack courage to deal with [this problem]? [I believe that] we do. Our lack of courage has been apparent ever since we invented the excuse of ‘external [influences],’ and began to toy with it and wave it at every opportunity. I do not know where these [external influences] come from, since it was we who sent our young men [to Afghanistan] in the first place, before we ever heard of [these influences] that allegedly come [from outside].

“Some preachers, [namely] those who fear the censor, deceive him by being implicit in their incitement to [wage] jihad in Iraq or Afghanistan. They speak in their sermons about the merits of jihad without mentioning a particular region. They speak in general terms that can be applied to any location, even to our [own] country. During the prayer, the details start to pour in thick and fast: first, [a call to wage jihad] in Palestine, [which serve as] a smokescreen, and then [calls for jihad] in Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya, and finally… the call ‘oh Allah, grant them victory everywhere!’ ‘Everywhere’ includes our [own] country… and we say ‘amen’ after the preacher calls [upon Allah] to help the mujahideen in our [own] country…”

Saudi Released From Guantanamo: Fatwas Prompted Me to Join the Jihad

Sa’d Ibrahim Al-Bidna, a young Saudi, traveled to Afghanistan with the aim of joining the jihad. He was arrested two months later, and spent four years and eight months at Guantanamo. In an interview with Al-Riyadh, he said that it was fatwas posted on the Internet that motivated him to wage jihad.

Al-Riyadh: “Tell us of your journey, from [the time] you left Saudi Arabia until your return.”

Al-Bidna: “I started this exhausting journey when I left Saudi Arabia on my own, motivated by youthful enthusiasm to [wage] jihad for the sake of Allah in Afghanistan. I traveled to Afghanistan through Syria and Iran. [When I arrived], war was being waged against the Taliban and things were not clear to me. So I decided to leave Afghanistan for Pakistan, and from there to return to Saudi Arabia. But [when I reached] Pakistan, I was arrested and turned over to the American forces. [They] imprisoned me in Guantanamo, [where I remained] until the Saudi authorities intervened and brought me back to Saudi Arabia after years of suffering…”

Al-Riyadh: “Tell us about the beginning of your journey and the reasons [that motivated you] to set out for Afghanistan.”

Al-Bidna: “Many may find it difficult to believe, but I was not very devout, though I did pray regularly. But enthusiasm and zeal filled the hearts of many young people, and unfortunately, I followed certain fatwas that were posted on the Internet. [These fatwas] call upon young people to wage jihad in certain regions. They tempt them [by describing] the great reward [they will receive], the status of the martyrs in Paradise and the virgins that await them [there]. These fatwas have great influence on young people who have no awareness or knowledge [that enables them] to examine them and verify their validity.”

In Afghanistan, I Saw Muslims Fighting Muslims, and That is Why I Left

Al-Riyadh: “When you came to Afghanistan, did you find the notion of jihad to be as you had imagined it…?”

Al-Bidna: “When I arrived, the war against the Taliban was at its height. There were constant bombardments and things were not clear to me, especially since I was only there for two months. This is not enough time to understand how things really are. But what concerned me the most was that Muslims were fighting each other, and that is why I left [and went to] Pakistan – for in jihad, a Muslim must never fight his Muslim brother.”

Al-Riyadh: “Based on your experience, did you feel that there was no real jihad in Afghanistan?”

Al-Bidna: “The [brief] period I spent there did not enable me see the full picture, and I did not have the knowledge to distinguish real jihad from other actions that are [only] called jihad. But I did see that there were devout people there. Some of them were young men who came [to Afghanistan] out of youthful enthusiasm and [due to their] scant religious knowledge, or were influenced by certain fatwas published by various religious scholars, or [were influenced by] by false images, which were not free of exaggeration, of the situation in Afghanistan. This was the kind of thing that prompted me to set out without informing or asking my family, and without considering the concept of legitimate jihad, its conditions and its rules.”

Al-Riyadh: “Today, do you feel that you were wrong to set out [to Afghanistan], obeying some irresponsible fatwas?”

Al-Bidna: “Of course. I [now] understand that I was wrong. I should have asked the leaders for permission to set out [and wage jihad], or religious scholars known for their knowledge and piety, of which there are many in our country…”

Al-Riyadh: “Before you left for Afghanistan, was there anyone who urged you and encouraged you to go?”

Al-Bidna: “I did not belong to any group or organization, especially since I was not devout before I left. But there were obviously some fatwas that called [for jihad] and were posted on certain websites. [They] influenced many young men, both devout and [non-devout]…”

Had I Received Proper Guidance Before I Left for Afghanistan, I Would Not Have Gone

Al-Riyadh: “After returning [to Saudi Arabia], did you meet with the counseling committees? What changed in your way of thinking?”

Al-Bidna: “My views began to change when I saw the real picture and understood my error, [even] before I was captured. When I returned to Saudi Arabia, we [i.e. the prisoners released from Guantanamo] met with sheikhs and religious scholars who taught us a great deal, and who enlightened us on the tolerant directives of Islam. Had I [known all this] before I left, I would not have gone. The discussions with the religious scholars and sheikhs gave us the ability to distinguish truth from error, and set us on the right path.”

Al-Riyadh: “From your experience, are there specific reasons that cause young people to adopt deviant views and carry out terrorist actions?”

Al-Bidna: “Of course there are specific reasons [that motivate] young people, especially unemployment, the desire for self-fulfillment, and [having] free time. I, for example, finished [only] elementary school, and sat around without a job for many years prior to leaving for Afghanistan. Such things can cause young people to go astray, especially when there are [people] who feed them erroneous notions…”

Al-Riyadh: “Do you think that a fatwa posted online can prompt a young person to wage jihad, when he does not know for sure whether the fatwa is valid?”

Al-Bidna: “There is no doubt that the problem lies in the youth’s enthusiasm [coupled with] scant knowledge. That’s what happened with me. I did not think to verify the validity of these fatwas or to consult with anyone, and [consequently] made a big mistake…”

October 17, 2006
MIM: According to the Society for Internet Research more then 500 Christians were killed in Somali over the past decade. The killing of an Italian nun in front of a children’s hospital had several precedents which garnered scant media attention.

“….there were several attacks against non-Muslim international relief workers in October–December 2003. On October 5, 2003, the Italian nun Annalena Tonneli—known as Mother Theresa of Africa and who had served in Somalia for thirty years “founding a hospital, orphanages and schools”—was killed by two armed men in front of the hospital. Soon after, on October 20, 2003, a British couple Richard and Enid Eyeington—working for SOS Children’s villages in Somaliland—were shot dead by several gunmen in their home inside the school compound. In November 2003 a Kenyan Christian working for the Seventh Day Adventist mission in Gedo, South West Somalia, was reportedly murdered by Islamist radicals…”

The zero tolerance for Christians was epitomised by the words of a Sheik who pronounced a death sentence on them in a 2003 interview:

“… Sheikh Nur Barud, vice chairman of the influential Somali Islamist group Kulanka Culimada…stressed that “all Somali Christians must be killed according to the Islamic law. A Muslim can never become a Christian but he can become an apostate. Such people do not have a place in Somalia and we will never recognize their existence and we will slaughter them”. The Sheikh concluded his interview by saying “Somalis are 100 percent Muslim and they will always remain so”.

MIM: How ironic that Somali taxi drivers at the Minnesota airport attempting to implement shari’a law by not picking up non Muslim passengers carrying alchohol complained that their “religious rights have to be respected”. jOver the years groups of Somali workers have been filing lawsuits against employers for discrimination after they were not granted permission to pray 5 times a day on company time.

More egregious still – Somali Muslims who were resettled in the United States to escape the strife in their home country are sending millions back to the warlords to perpetuate the violence. The government is also comprised of Islamists who believe in equal opportunity murder, and recently executed a citizen for a cell phone dispute to make it clear that shari’a law was to be enforced.

“…The man killed Friday, was sentenced to death for murdering a man in a cell phone dispute. A spokesman for the Islamic courts said the execution will send a message that Islamic sharia law will be enforced…” http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-09-22-voa14.cfm

Somalia is considered to be a country that does not recognize religious freedom, because there is no constitution and no legal provision for its protection. About 99.5 percent of the Somalia population is Muslim. The very small Christian minority comprises of ethnic Bantus, as well as humanitarian workers and expatriates. According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a Christian human rights organization, Somalia is the worst persecutor of Christians among all the nations in Africa. Thus, it can mean death to be openly Christian in Somalia. Christians are now the only group having no place to flee in Somalia, and cannot register as refugees to resettle in other countries. Since Muslims control refugee camps, most Christians have fled to the remote areas of Ethiopia and Kenya along the border.

Since U.S. and U.N. peacekeeping forces left in 1995, Islamic mobs have murdered more than 500 Christians in Somalia. The Transitional Federal Government (TFG), created in 2004, has enacted a constitution, which recognizes only Islam as the national religion. It tried to establish a central government but the two other parts of the country, the Republic of Somaliland and the Republic of Puntland, have declared independence, proclaiming themselves to be Islamic states, and established Shari’ah law. However, regional authorities do not espouse rhetoric against non-Muslims. The Judiciary in most regions relies on some combination of Shari’ah, traditional and customary law, and the Penal Code of the pre-1991 Siad Barre government.

The hatred of the Muslims toward Christians may be caused by the attitude of many toward Christianity, which is regarded as a foreign religion of their historic enemies in Ethiopia and their former colonial masters, Italy and Great Britain. In 1886 the Roman Catholic Mission setup a mission base and established a school at the port town of Berbera in the then British protectorate of Somaliland. About the same time the Franciscan mission of the Roman Catholic Church and the Swedish Overseas Lutheran Mission each setup a mission base in Mogadishu and Kismayu towns respectively. Soon, the church was expanding rapidly to Margarita (Jamame), Mugambo and Alexandra (Jilib). Their missionary brought about a tiny Christian community of up to one thousand people, mainly in the south.

During the 1950s three Christian missions, namely the Swedish Lutheran Mission, the Mennonite Mission and Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) arrived in Somalia and Somali inhabited territories of Ethiopia and Kenya. Small group house churches sprung up in several towns throughout the Somali territory. As the church started to grow, so was the persecution, murdering and forced exile. Church property and institutions were nationalized in 1972 and all mission work was stopped in 1974. Furthermore, during Said Barre’s rule, in the 1970s and 1980s, the government banned the printing, importing, distributing or selling of Christian literature in the country. The government and its National Security Services secret police threatened, arrested, tortured, and murdered Somali Christians. Literally, freedom of religion was stated in the national constitution, but practically no one applied it. Many Somali Christians lost their jobs and businesses; others to survive abandoned their faith or immigrated to the western world. Those lucky enough got jobs with western embassies and international organizations in Mogadishu.

When president Siad Barre’s government was ousted from power in 1991 and the national government of Somalia fell apart, radical Muslim organizations became stronger and more powerful to do whatever they wish. They set up a committee of several sheikhs to search and identify all Somali Christians, whether they were in or out of Somalia. They also appointed a group of armed young men to execute all Somali Christians. Between January 1991 and December 1995 over two hundred Somali Christian adults were killed in Somalia and the neighboring countries of Yemen, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti. Many more were wounded and either became refugee to other countries or denied their faith to save their lives. Thousands of Somali Christians left Somalia and became refugees and still many more Christians remain underground in Somalia. They followed those who took refuge to Kenya and the neighboring countries. Many are persecuted, beaten or charged with false accusations in Nairobi by the Somali radical Muslims. In May 2001, for instance, Somali Christian man by the name of Bashir was tranquillized by his relatives by force and abducted to Somalia through Wilson airport without the government’s knowledge of his being abducted. Later, he was murdered in Burao, Somalia.

Thus, many Christian Somalis have fled abroad as a result of the wars, chaos, civil strife and instability which followed the collapse of Somalia in 1991, a situation which apparently continued following the withdrawal of American forces in 1994. Christian churches have been driven underground because of persecution and a number of Christians have been imprisoned and martyred over the years. Evangelism is prohibited, and Christians pray on Friday to avoid association with foreign Christianity.

The peace conference nearly collapsed in February 2003, when three Somali Christians went to Eldoret town and requested to participate on the Somali peace conference and represent the Somali Christian community. The Christians had demanded their right to freedom of religion and assembly, political representation, and free movement. Christian representatives were reportedly “shouted down by Muslim delegates who insisted Somalia had no Christians and who declared Islam to be the official religion of Somalia.” Peter Ahmed Abdi, leader of the Mogadishu Pentecostal Church, who is also chairman of the tiny Christian Somali community, said then “we live in constant fear. We have very little rights, since people believe that there are no Christians in Somalia”.

On February 9, 2003, the umbrella of the Somali Muslim religious groups, a powerful religious organ, met in Mogadishu and issued a memorandum. They stated in their memorandum and press release which was broadcasted or published by several local and international radio stations, newspapers and websites several articles concerning the Somali Christians. They also asked the participants of the peace conference not to accept any Somali who is claiming that he or she is Christian to participate in the conference and sit with them. According to the articles, Somali Christians abandoned Islam and must be killed; Somali Christians can neither inherit nor be inherited; their marriage to their spouses must be dissolved; Somali Christians forfeited their Somalihood; and once they die, Somali Christians cannot be buried in Somali soil. Fourteen sheikhs representing different major Somali clans signed this memorandum. Some of them are those who authorized and organized the campaign to eliminate Somali Christians from the Horn of Africa region.Sheikh Nur Barud, vice chairman of the influential Somali Islamist group Kulanka Culimada, claimed on April 22, 2004, that “some Somalis who claimed to be Christians went to attend the Somali reconciliation conference in Nairobi. These Somalis are apostates and they will be killed upon their return to Somalia”. The Kulanka Culimada was founded in February 1991. Most of its key leaders are graduates of Islamic seminaries in Saudi Arabia. In an interview to Himilo online held in November 2003, the Sheikh stressed that “all Somali Christians must be killed according to the Islamic law. A Muslim can never become a Christian but he can become an apostate. Such people do not have a place in Somalia and we will never recognize their existence and we will slaughter them”. The Sheikh concluded his interview by saying “Somalis are 100 percent Muslim and they will always remain so”.

According to the U.S. State Department’s 2005 report on international religious freedom, the Christian minority in Somalia is “small” and “extremely law profile”. Proselytizing for any religion except Islam is prohibited in Puntland and Somaliland and effectively blocked by informal social consensus elsewhere in the country. Although Christian-based international relief organizations generally operate without interference, provided that they refrain from proselytizing, there were several attacks against non-Muslim international relief workers in October–December 2003. On October 5, 2003, the Italian nun Annalena Tonneli—known as Mother Theresa of Africa and who had served in Somalia for thirty years “founding a hospital, orphanages and schools”—was killed by two armed men in front of the hospital. Soon after, on October 20, 2003, a British couple Richard and Enid Eyeington—working for SOS Children’s villages in Somaliland—were shot dead by several gunmen in their home inside the school compound. In November 2003 a Kenyan Christian working for the Seventh Day Adventist mission in Gedo, South West Somalia, was reportedly murdered by Islamist radicals.

In addition, in April 2004. thousands of Somalian Muslims marched through the streets of Mogadishu and in the southern coastal town of Merca, protesting at what they said was an attempt by aid agencies to spread Christianity. Muslim scholars organized the protest following reports that school children were given gifts with Christian emblems alongside charitable aid. The protesters set ablaze hundreds of cartoons containing goods, some marked only as gifts from the “Swiss Church”. The protesters warned the aid agencies against using relief items to evangelize in the country.

Despite some weak politically correct attempts, the fact is there is a radical, heretical brand of Islam fostering terrorism that is indeed a by-product of Fascism and a hatred of Jews

Folks seem to be in a quandary: Should US president George W. Bush have used the terms “Islam” and “Fascists” in the same sentence. The majority of the negative comments have been directed toward the president’s lack of sensitivity toward the vast majority of followers of Islam.

But despite some weak politically correct attempts, the fact is that the press for the most part is guilty of whitewashing one simple fact: There is a radical, heretical brand of Islam fostering terrorism that is indeed a by-product of Fascism and a hatred of Jews. Shahid Nickels, a member between 1998 and 2000 of the group headed by Mohammed Atta who led the 9-11 attacks, said that “Atta’s weltanschauung was based on a National Socialist way of thinking. He was convinced that ‘the Jews’ are determined to achieve world domination. He considered
New York City to be the center of world Jewry which was, in his opinion, Enemy Number One,” according to an article written by Dr. Matthias Küntzel. (1)Atta’s peculiar “Nationalist Socialist way of thinking,” however, was far from unique. In fact, it was a seed germinating for 80 years among radical Islamists that can be traced to Hassan al-Banna, a 22-year-old school teacher who gathered discontent Muslims to found the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928/1929.

While initial growth of the Muslim Brotherhood was moderate, the organization’s membership rolls – coinciding with rising anti-Semitism in
Europe – by August 1938 had swelled to more than two hundred thousand members. By the end of World War II the Muslim Brotherhood had around half a million members.“Islamism, or fascism with an Islamic face, was born with and of the Muslim Brotherhood. It proved (and improved) its fascist core convictions and practices through collaboration with the Nazis in the run-up to and during World War II. It proved it during the same period through its collaboration with the overtly fascist “Young Egypt” (Misr al-Fatah) movement, founded in October 1933 by lawyer Ahmed Hussein and modeled directly on the Hitler party, complete with paramilitary Green Shirts aping the Nazi Brown Shirts, Nazi salute and literal translations of Nazi slogans. Among its members, Young Egypt counted two promising youngsters and later presidents, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat,” so begins an Asia Times article by Marc Erikson. (2)

“The “Supreme Guide” of the brethren knew that faith, good works and numbers alone do not a political victory make. Thus, modeled on Mussolini’s blackshirts (al-Banna much admired “Il Duce” and soul brother “Fuehrer” Adolf Hitler), he set up a paramilitary wing (slogan: “action, obedience, silence”, quite superior to the blackshirts’ “believe, obey, fight”) and a “secret apparatus” (al-jihaz al-sirri) and intelligence arm of al-Ikhwan to handle the dirtier side – terrorist attacks, assassinations, and so on – of the struggle for power,” writes Erikson elsewhere. (3)According to John Loftus, a former prosecutor with the
US Justice Department, “Al-Banna formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna was a devout admirer of Adolf Hitler and wrote to him frequently.”

Loftus adds that Al-Banna was so persistent in his “admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930s Al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence. With the goal of the Third Reich to develop the Muslim Brotherhood as an army inside
Egypt.” (4)

So what was Al-Banna teaching?

Well, for one thing Al-Banna idealized death.

“To a nation that perfects the industry of death and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud life in this world and eternal grace in the life to come” and “We are not afraid of death, we desire it… Let us die in redemption for Muslims,” Al-Banna once wrote.The Muslim Brotherhood also “used and disseminated a quotation from the Koran that Jews are to be considered ‘the worst enemy of the believers.’ In addition, they evoked old stories of the early history of Islam by pointing to the example set by Mohammed who, as legend has it, succeeded not only in expelling two Jewish tribes from Medina during the 7th century, but killed the entire male population of the third tribe and sold all the women and children into slavery.” (5)Spreading their hate-filled message toward Jews, the Muslim Brotherhood found a soul-mate in Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem who held the highest political and religious posts in
Palestine from 1921 until after World War II. Loftus and other authors note that the Muslim Brotherhood and Mufti had common goals with the new Nazi doctrines: a hatred for Western culture, democracy and Jews.The Mufti with the Muslim Brotherhood and Nazi ideology was a dangerous cocktail.“As early as 1929, a Mufti-led pogrom killed 133 autochthonous Jews in Jerusalem and
Hebron. Shortly thereafter, the Mufti declared the relentless fight against the Jews as the most important responsibility of all believers. Those who dared to resist his anti-Jewish orders were publicly denounced and publicly threatened in the mosques during Friday prayers.” (6)“In a letter to Adolf Hitler, the Mufti emphasized his unflagging and successful efforts to use the “the
Palestine question” in order ‘to coalesce all Arab countries in a common hatred against the British and the Jews.'” (7) Starting in 1933, the Mufti repeatedly offered to serve the German Nazi government. In the beginning, however, the Mufti’s fight against Jews was only supported in terms of ideology. That soon, however, changed.

The Palestine’s 1936 “Arab Revolt” was in a large part incited by the Mufti, with cries of “Down with the Jews!” and “Jews get out of Egypt and
Palestine!”

It was not until 1937 that the Mufti’s “Holy War” began to receive substantial financial support and weapons from Nazi Germany, which allowed Hitler’s Islamist agents both in Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt to spread their anti-Jewish hatred.Klaus Gensicke writes in his dissertation on the Mufti’s collaboration with the Nazis: “The Mufti himself admitted that it was entirely due to the money contributed by the Germans that allowed him at that time to carry out the uprising in
Palestine.”

“The Mufti’s so-called “Arab Revolt” took place against the background of the swastika: Arab leaflets and signs on walls were prominently marked with this Nazi symbol; the youth organization of the Mufti´s political party paraded as “Nazi-scouts”, and Arab children greeted each other with the Nazi salute. Those who had to pass through the rebellious quarters of
Palestine attached a flag bearing the swastika to their vehicles so as to insure protection against assaults by the Mufti’s volunteers.” (8)

By 1945 the Nazi Islamist agents were openly spreading terror. “The core of anti-Semitism had thus begun to shift from
Germany to the Arab world. On the anniversary of the Balfour-declaration, demonstrators rampaged the Jewish quarters of
Cairo. They plundered houses and shops, attacked non-Muslims, devastated the synagogues and then set them on fire. Six people were killed, several hundred more were injured.” (9)Al-Husseini, wrote in his post-WWII memoirs, “Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from
Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by
Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: ‘The Jews are yours.'” (10)

According to an article by David Storobin in Front Page magazine, “Controlling a spectacular sum of money and the right to appoint Palestinian Islamic preachers, al-Husseini built a ‘political machine’ that brought the religious and political establishment under his domination. Through them, he was able to arouse religious fanaticism against Jews and the West. His preachers urged their flock to ‘go out and murder the Jewish infidel in the name of the holy Koran,’ constantly declaring that ‘he who kills a Jew is assured of a place in the next world.’” (11)

Dr. Matthias Küntzel quotes Klaus Gensicke who claims that “The Mufti himself admitted that it was entirely due to the money contributed by the Germans that allowed him at that time to carry out the uprising in
Palestine.” (12)

Storobin notes that al-Husseini was, “officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941, who agreed to establish a bureau for al-Husseini which was used to spread propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany, organize spy rings in Europe and the Middle East, and most importantly, establish Muslim Nazi SS divisions and Wehrmacht units in Bosnia, the Balkans, North Africa and Nazi-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. After the meeting, the Mufti was also named SS Gruppenfuehrer by Heinrich Himmler and referred to as the “Fuhrer of the Arab World” by Adolf Hitler himself.”

”The largest Muslim Nazi SS unit was the 13th division known as “Hanjar.” Husseini also organized smaller, less efficient units, including the 21st Waffen SS division known Skanderbeg (made up predominantly of Croatians) and the 23rd Waffen SS division known as
Kama and made up mostly of Albanian Muslims. Thus, the Hitler’s Mufti organized or helped to organize three out of 27 Waffen SS divisions formed before 1945.” (13)

Loftus too claims that the Mufti “went to
Germany during the war and helped recruit an international SS division of Arab Nazis. They based it in Croatia and called it the Handzar Muslim Division, but it was to become the core of Hitler’s new army of Arab fascists that would conquer the Arabian Peninsula and, from there, on to Africa—grand dreams.” (14)

According to Küntzel, “The powerful collaboration of the Muslim Brothers with the Mufti and the pogroms against Jews a few months after the world learned about
Auschwitz clearly showed that the Brotherhood either ignored or even justified Hitler´s extermination of European Jews.”

Küntzel telling writes that “The consequences of this attitude, however, continue to be far-reaching and characterize the Arabic-Jewish conflict to this day.” (15) Küntzel notes that this group of Islamists in 1947 explained away the international support of the creation of
Israel and the murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany, by reverting to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

In this vein, the Muslim Brotherhood considered the UN-decision of 1947 to partition
Palestine to be an “international plot carried out by the Americans, the Russians and the British, under the influence of Zionism,” (16) Küntzel noted. (17)Not surprisingly, given their role in WWII, the Muslim Brotherhood was wanted for War Crimes. However, instead of being brought to justice the Arab Nazis were snapped up by foreign spy agencies. Specifically, John Loftus claims that, almost the entire network was taken in by the British Secret Service. “Then a horrible thing happened. Instead of prosecuting the Nazis—the Muslim Brotherhood—the British Government hired them. They brought all the fugitive Nazi war criminals of Arab and Muslim descent into
Egypt, and for three years trained them on a special mission. The British Secret Service wanted to use the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood to strike down the infant state of
Israel in 1948. Only a few people in the Mossad know this, but many of the members of the Arab armies and terrorist groups that tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

”
Britain was not alone. The French Intelligence Service cooperated by releasing the Grand Mufti and smuggling him to Egypt, so all of the Arab Nazis came together. So, from 1945 to 1948, the British Secret Service protected every Arab Nazi it could, but failed to quash the State of Israel”, according to Loftus. (18)Despite being now on side of the Allies, the Brotherhood didn’t sit still – nor did their ideology get any tamer. One of the main voices behind the Muslim Brotherhood was Sayed Qutb. With time, Qutb would eventually become the organization’s ambassador in the 1950s in
Syria and Jordon, as well as being the editor of the Brotherhood’s official publication. While in prison following an assassination attempt on Egypt’s
Nasser, Qutb wrote his treatise, Milestones, that advocated overthrowing Arab governments that refused to be run by anything other than the law of Islamic Shariah. According to a BBC article, “For Qutb, all non-Muslims were infidels – even the so-called ‘people of the book’, the Christians and Jews – and he predicted an eventual clash of civilisations between Islam and the west.” (19) “Having played a large role in Nasser’s power grab, the Muslim Brotherhood, after the 1949 assassination of Hassan al-Banna by government agents under new leadership and (since 1951) under the radical ideological guidance of Sayyid Qutb, demanded its due – imposition of Sharia (Islamic religious) law. When
Nasser demurred, he became a Brotherhood assassination target, but with CIA and the German mercenaries’ help he prevailed. In February 1954, the Brotherhood was banned. An October 1954 assassination attempt failed. Four thousand brothers were arrested, six were executed, and thousands fled to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and
Lebanon,” notes Erikson. (20)When Nasser cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood in 1955 they initially moved headquarters to London and
Geneva. Incidentally, the head of the
Geneva offices was Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of al-Banna. In
Geneva, Ramadan launched the Institute for Islamic Studies – to become the civilized face of the Muslim Brotherhood, even having the distinction of dining with US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 at the White House. (21) That fleeing of Muslim Brotherhood members – people who had been radicalized by Qutb, the Mufti and Nazi ideology – and the consequent spreading of their message, is something that the world is still living with.According to that same BBC article, “Qutb and (
Pakistan’s Syed Abul Ala Maududi) inspired a whole generation of Islamists, including Ayatollah Khomeini, who developed a Persian version of their works in the 1970s.

Author and journalist Robert Dreyfuss also claims that the groundwork for the Ayatollah Khomeini was done by an Iranian by the name of Ali Shariat who was influenced by the Brotherhood.

As a sidenote, with respect to Hezbollah, it is widely reported that the organization got its beginnings in
Iran. That is an oversimplification.

“The origins of Shi’i Islamism in Lebanon go back not to Iran, as is commonly thought, but to Iraq in the 1960s where a Shi’i religio-political revival took place in the “circles of learning” (hawzat al-‘ilmiya) in Najaf, led by the charismatic Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr,” according to an article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs – Sept. 1997.

“Hezbollah represented a militant, nonsecular alternative to the Nasserite Fatah, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other groups that took their bearing from Pan-Arabism rather than Islam. Hezbollah split the Shiite community in
Lebanon — which was against Sunnis and Christians — but most of all, engaged the Israelis. It made a powerful claim that the Palestinian movement had no future while it remained fundamentally secular and while its religious alternatives derived from the conservative Arab monarchies.” (22)

Iran’s importance only became more noted upon the death of Sadr, and the success of the Iranian Revolution led by Khomeini. By 1984, Iran was financing around 90 percent of Hezbollah’s social works in
Lebanon.

As it stands now, Hezbollah “subscribes to Khomeini’s theory that a religious jurist (wilayat al-faqih) should hold ultimate political power. The authority of this jurist, both spiritual and political, may not be challenged; he must be obeyed. Hezbullah sees itself fulfilling the messianic role of turning Lebanon into a

province of
Islam. In its “open letter” of February 1985, Hizbullah declared that Muslims must “abide by the orders of the sole wise and just command represented by the supreme jurisconsult, who is presently incarnate in the imam_Ayatollah Khomeini. It also called for a battle with vice, meaning foremost the United States, and for the destruction of Israel to make way for
Palestine,” according to that same Middle East Review of International Affairs article.

Eventually, says Loftus the control of the Muslim Brotherhood passed to the
United States and the CIA – or its earlier form – as a counterweight for Arab Communists.

But this still doesn’t explain how we get the current form of Islam Fascists. For that one needs to remember that after Nasser expelled the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt many of them went to
Saudi Arabia.

According to Loftus, “during the 1950s, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to
Saudi Arabia. Now, when they arrived in
Saudi Arabia, some of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood, like (Dr Abdullah) Azzam, became the teachers in the madrassas, the religious schools. And there they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabism.”

“Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not. They think that Islam—the Saudi version of Islam—is typical, but it’s not. The Wahhabi cult has been condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence. This is a very harsh cult. Wahhabism was only practised by the Taliban and in
Saudi Arabia—that’s how extreme it is. It really has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant religion. It always had good relationships with the Jews for the first thousand years of its existence.” (23)

Interestingly, according to a Wikipedia entry on Wahhabism, Al-Banna, is said to have been influenced by the Wahhabis. “The Muslim Brotherhood also claimed to be purifying and restoring original Islam. When the Muslim Brotherhood was banned in various Middle Eastern countries,
Saudi Arabia gave refuge to Brotherhood exiles. This seems to have set the stage for a mingling of Brotherhood and Wahhabi thought under the aegis of the term Salafism. Rebels against the Saudi state found justification in the thought of Sayyed Qutb, a member of the Brotherhood who spent years in Egyptian jails. Some Wahhabis, or Salafis, rejected what they call Qutbism, as a deviation from true Salafism. Thus there is now a considerable spectrum of religious opinion within Saudi Wahhabism/Salafism, to a great extent divided on the question of whether the Saudi state is to be supported, endured patiently, or violently opposed. The modern day Salafis, deny that Hassan al-Banna or Sayid Qutb were followers of the Salaf, since they upheld the view that it is allowed to overthrow the Muslim leader, and to make “Takfeer” (the act of placing a Muslim out of the fold of Islam, making him a disbeliever) on him based on Major Sins. (24)To this last point, Trevor Stanley also writes that today there are “a profusion of self-proclaimed Salafi groups,” where each accuses “the others of deviating from ‘true’ Salafism.”

Stanley notes that “Since the 1970s, the Saudis have wisely stopped funding those Salafis that excommunicate nominally Muslim governments (or at least the Saudi government), condemning al-Qaeda as ‘the deviant sect’. The pro-Saudis correctly trace al-Qaeda’s ideological roots to Qutb and al-Banna. Less accurately, they accuse these groups of insidiously ‘entering’ Salafism. In fact, Salafism was imported into
Saudi Arabia in its Ikhwani and Qutbist forms. This does not mean that the pro-Saudi Salafis are necessarily benign – for example, Abu Mu’aadh as-Salafee’s main criticism of Qutb and Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna is that they claim Islam teaches tolerance of Jews.” (25)

Meanwhile, non-Muslims and mainstream Muslims alike use the ‘Wahhabi-Salafi’ label to denigrate Salafis and even completely unrelated groups such as the Taliban, adds Stanley.

It was in the Saudi Arabian madrassas, or schools, of Abdullah Azzam that Nazi Fascism with religious extremism were married.

And in one of those madrassas, the student Osama bin Laden studied.

“Should it further surprise us that Osama bin Laden accuses ‘the Jews” of “holding America and the West hostage’ given the fact, that the founder of Hamas, the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, was at the same time the most important teacher and patron of al Qaida’s leader?” asks Dr. Matthias Küntzel (26)

“The origins of Bin Laden’s concept of jihad can be traced back to two early 20th century figures, who started powerful Islamic revivalist movements in response to colonialism and its aftermath,” writes Fiona Symon, a Middle East analyst. “Pakistan and Egypt – both Muslim countries with a strong intellectual tradition – produced the movements and ideology that would transform the concept of jihad in the modern world.”

“They blamed the western idea of the separation of religion and politics for the decline of Muslim societies … This, they believed, could only be corrected through a return to Islam in its traditional form, in which society was governed by a strict code of Islamic law,” Symon writes, adding: “Al-Banna and Maudoudi breathed new life into the concept of jihad as a holy war to end the foreign occupation of Muslim lands.” (27)

Loftus – and many other authors – says that with the Russian invastion of
Afghanistan in 1979, “the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage.”

“So we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians,” according to Loftus. “We had to rename them. We couldn’t call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi past was too known. So we called them Maktab al-Khadamat al-Mujahidin, the MAK.” (28)

One of those people shipped off to Afghanistan, after being indoctrinated in Azzam’s madrassas, was Osama bin Laden – and who in turn melded the ideas of Hassan al-Al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood with those of Pakistan’s Syed Abul Ala Maududi’s Jamaat Islami after being exposed to it while fighting in Afghanistan.

Their terror has now extended to the entire world.

While the vast majority of believers in Islam certainly cannot be labeled as Islam Fascists, it remains that there is a group within the Muslim ranks that does have its roots based in National Socialism and Fascist ideologies. In an effort to brand Bush as politically incorrect, anti-Bush politicians and bloggers who are ignorant of history have become unwitting apologists for Islamo-Fascism, a movement within Islam that many Muslims claim is heretical.

The Big Picture

Source: The author is attorney and writer Raymond S. Kraft, who lives in California.

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.

The U.S. was in an isolationist, pacifist, mood, and most Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, and, in outrage, Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

France was not an ally; the Vichy government of France aligned with its German occupiers. Germany was not an ally; it was an enemy, and Hitler intended to set up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally; it was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia. Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then the United States over the north and south borders, after they had settled control of Asia and Europe.

America’s allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia, and that was about it.

All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the east, was already under the Nazi heel.

America was not prepared for war. America had stood down most of its military after WWI and throughout the depression; at the outbreak of WWII, there were army units training with broomsticks over their shoulders because they didn’t have guns, and cars with “tank” painted on the doors because they didn’t have tanks. And a big chunk of our navy had just been sunk and damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600,000,000 in gold bullion in the Bank of England that was the property of Belgium and was given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler. Actually, Belgium surrendered one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day anyway just to prove that they could. Britain had been holding out for two years already in the face of staggering shipping losses and the near-decimation of its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking that the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later and turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.

Russia saved America’s butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years until the U.S. got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.

Russia lost something like 24,000,000 people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than 1,000,000 soldiers. More than a million.

Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would have won that war.

I say this to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. And we are at another one.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam (assisted through complacence by the majority—ed.) that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world, unless they are prevented from doing so.

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs — they believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world, and that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East — for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win — the Inquisition, or the Reformation.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the U.S., European, and Asian economies, the techno-industrial economies, will be at the mercy of OPEC — not an OPEC dominated by the well-educated and rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.

You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter? You want jobs.

You want the dollar to be worth anything? You had better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do it nowhere.

And we cannot do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle now at the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq.

Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we did and are doing two very important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a terrorist.

Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than 1,000,000 Iraqis and 2,000,000 Iranians.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad guys there, and the ones we get there we won’t have to get here, or anywhere else. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

World War II, the war with the German and Japanese Nazis, really began with a “whimper” in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for 14 years before America joined it. It officially ended in 1945 — a 17 year war — and was followed by another decade of U.S. occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again … a 27-year war. World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year’s GDP – adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12,000,000,000,000 dollars, WWII cost America more than 400,000 killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the U.S. about $160 billion, which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost about 2,200 American lives, which is roughly 1/2 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed out on 9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning WWII would have been unimaginably greater — a world now dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.

Americans have a short attention span, now, conditioned I suppose by 60-minute TV shows and two-hour movies in which everything comes out okay.

The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will be.

The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away on its own. It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the U.S. can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an “England” in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. And now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. Unless we prevent them. Or somebody does.

We have four options

1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran’s progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).

3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East, now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.

4. Or, we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and maybe most of the rest of Europe. It will be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier then.

Yes, the Jihadis say that they look forward to an Islamic America. If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Shar’ia, an America that resembles Iran today.

We can be defeatist peace-activists as anti-war types seem to be, and concede, surrender, to the Jihad, or we can do whatever it takes to win this war against them.

The history of the world is the history of civilizational clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.

In the 20th century, it was Western democracy vs. communism, and before that Western democracy vs. Nazism, and before that Western democracy vs. German Imperialism. Western democracy won, three times, but it wasn’t cheap, fun, nice, easy, or quick. Indeed, the wars against German Imperialism (WWI), Nazi Imperialism (WWII), and communist imperialism (the 40-year Cold War that included the Vietnam Battle, commonly called the Vietnam War, but itself a major battle in a larger war) covered almost the entire century.

The first major war of the 21st Century is the war between Western Judeo/Christian Civilization and Wahhabi Islam. It may last a few more years, or most of this century. It will last until the Wahhabi branch of Islam fades away, or gives up its ambitions for regional and global dominance and Jihad, or until Western Civilization gives in to the Jihad.

It will take time. It will not go with no hitches. This is not TV.

Remember, perspective is everything, and America’s schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.

The Cold war lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Forty-two years. Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany.

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a 10-year occupation and the U.S. still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50,000,000 people, maybe more than 100,000,000 people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The U.S. has taken a little more than 2,000 KIA in Iraq. The US took more than 4,000 Killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion, to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism. In WWII, the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week for four years. Most of the individual battles of WWII lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.

But the stakes are at least as high . . . a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms . . . or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Shar’ia (Islamic law).

I do not understand why the American Left does not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty, and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis. In America, absolutely, but nowhere else.

Three hundred thousand Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq are not our problem? The U.S. population is about twelve times that of Iraq, so let’s multiply 300,000 by twelve. What would you think if there were 3,600,000 American bodies in mass graves in America because of George Bush? Would you hope for another country to help liberate America?

“Peace Activists” always seem to demonstrate where it’s safe, in America. Why don’t we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places in the world that really need peace activism the most?

The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but, if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy.

If the Jihad wins, it is the death of Liberalism. Everywhere the Jihad wins, it is the death of Liberalism. And American Liberals just don’t get it.

Raymond S. Kraft is a writer and lawyer living in Northern California.

Flashback: Beginning of the Final World War

Tuesday, 21 February 2006, 1:01 pmOpinion: Scoop Flashback

SCOOP FLASHBACK

The War on Islam – Beginning of the Final World War

By Abid Ullah Jan
Forst Publushed The Frontier Post – Pakistan**** FLASHBACK **** November 11, 2001The optimists, who await an end to the post September 11 crisis, would end up as much disappointed tomorrow as the pacifists are today. Those who exaggerate the fear of “fundamentalist” Islam but underestimate the resistance in the Muslim world would soon realize that not only the world is not as it was; the war also is not as simple as they perceived it to be.

Out of a multiple fear of American wrath, Indian attack, economic embargo, and international isolation, we let the world feast on our Afghan brothers. However, we forgot that we might not even get enough time to digest the showering dollars for which we have sold our conscience, our dignity and unknowingly our existence as a state? The highly disguised intentions of Blair and Bush have turned our hasty decision to join the “coalition” into a time bomb, ticking to detonate with horrible consequences in the near future. The chickens of our instant surrender are already gradually coming home to roost.

It is now dawning on us that we are the pawns in the anti-Islam coalition. People ask, what other alternatives we had at our disposal? Instead, we must ask about the consequences of our meek surrender, which instantly nullify all the expected benefits. Lets look at a brief list of consequences at national level: democracy has been indefinitely postponed; the US may bomb us but we may not criticize it; dissent and protest have no place in the rewritten human rights; we must stop “terrorism” in Kashmir, or face the consequences (Joe Biden, Chairman Senate Foreign Relations Committee); Washington mulls “neutralizing” Pakistan nuclear facilities (the Statesman October 28); Pakistan’s nuclear weapons at risk from the US and Israeli plans to destroy (The New Yorker Magazine, November 5); US Special Unit ‘Stands by to Steal Pakistan’s Atomic Warheads’ (The Telegraph, October 29); Pakistan is flooded with refugees with no end to the war in sight; instead of its enemies, Pakistan’s war machine is in action against its own citizens; illegal and unconstitutional detentions are on the rise; and “Pakistan is in danger of falling apart,” (William Dalrymple, The Guardian, October, 23).

Some might question, if these are the fruits of cooperation, how could we afford the horrible consequences of defiance? The answer is: with or without cooperation we are the next victim anyway. We have simply given the US a time out to take us one by one. Remember the origins of World War II, when appeasement was based on the illusion that Hitler only wanted to reverse the wrongs, which Germany felt had been done to her. The West assumed that if the German claims were granted, peace in Europe would follow.

We have also wrongly assumed that the US is after Al-Qaida alone. Now it is out to dislodge the Taliban and set a stage for attacking Iraq and “neutralizing” Pakistan. This is just the beginning. To justify our decision made out of fear, we might justify the US terrorism as retribution of the September 11 attacks, but in fact there is no calculus of injustice. If the US is behaving unjustly, it should stop. It does not help its case to contend that others are acting “even more” unjustly. If the September 11 event is a crime, then the principles of justice must be followed in meting out punishment. Inventing another category called war and making it the special province of the US is not the answer. If Bush and Blair postulate that the principles of justice are suspended whenever they are at war, then every state can throw off the shackles of justice and do whatever it wants, including deliberately killing thousands who were not responsible for the initial injustice. Jumping into coalition with the US was a comfortable alternative. However, the unfolding events show that we have to reconsider our options for in this war there is very little room for mistakes and the situation could well lead to the final world war.

The Muslim world’s policy of appeasement is similar to what Britain and France embraced in vain in the 1930s in a bid to reach a peaceful understanding with Germany. Just like the forced retirement of some senior military officials in Pakistan, Anthony Eden, Chamberlain’s foreign secretary, who did not agree to give Hitler a free hand was replaced by Lord Halifax who fully supported the British policy of appeasement. In February 1938, Hitler invited the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, to meet him at Berchtesgarden. Just like the US demands to give Pakistan’s nuclear facilities and fate in the “safe” American hands, Hitler demanded similar concessions from Austria. The then “fundamentalist” Schuschnigg refused and was replaced by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the leader of the Austrian Nazi Party – “moderate” by the Nazi standards. On 13th March, Seyss-Inquart invited the German Army to occupy Austria.

Just like the present suggestions to transform Afghanistan into a UN run state (UN being an extension of the State Department), Hitler began demanding control of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In an attempt to solve the crisis, the heads of Germany, Britain, France and Italy met in Munich. On September 29, 1938 the Munich Agreement was signed to transfer to Germany the Sudetenland. Just like Pakistan and other Muslim states’ unwillingness to defend the cause of Afghan brothers, when Eduard Benes, Czechoslovakia’s head of state, protested at this decision, Neville Chamberlain told him that Britain would be unwilling to go to war over the issue of the Sudetenland.

Just like some initial positive response to Musharraf’s quick surrender, some people in Britain also appreciated the Munich Agreement because it appeared to have prevented the German wrath. Just like, the US changing objective from war on terrorism to war on the Taliban, Germany also seized the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 after getting a nod from the Munich Agreement. The policy of most Muslim heads of state on Afghanistan is no different than what Chamberlain expressed in a radio broadcast on September 27, 1938. He said: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country.” Churchill had the time to admit in 1948 that for the West “to leave its faithful ally Czechoslovakia to her fate was a melancholy lapse from which flowed terrible consequences.”

The present Muslim governments may not even get sufficient time to admit their folly of not calling a spade a spade when the US began military intervention from Afghanistan and tried to dominate the whole Muslim world. Just like our liberal columnists and Pakistan TV spreading the myth of American might and consequences of provoking American wrath, the Chamberlain government nurtured the fear of war in the British public, so that it will accept the appeasement policy. Like today’s’ twisted reporting by BBC and CNN, after Munich, the British public opinion was the victim of joint Anglo-German propaganda.

Just like the present Anglo-American alliance and our leaders busy in pleasing Uncle Sam, British politicians actively worked before World War II to bring closer their country with Hitler’s Germany. In January 1938, Neville Henderson, Britain’s ambassador to Germany, told Von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign minister: “I would view with dismay another defeat of Germany which would merely serve the purposes of inferior races.” In September 1939, as he spoke in front of a group of Lords, the duke of Westminster, known as an anti-Semite and an admirer of Germany, stated that he opposes the mutual shedding of the Britain and German blood, ” the two races which are the most akin and most disciplined in the world. (See, The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal by Clement Leibovitz, Les Editions Duval, Alberta, Canada, page 283, 496)

In Europe, Islamophobia has replaced Anti-Semitism and American appreciation has taken the place of German admiration. Just like the Muslim states’ missing opportunities to get united and enter into formidable alliances, Chamberlain and the other western heads of Government sabotaged the possibility to reach an agreement with Soviet Union to a common struggle against Hitler. Just like our misconceptions that it is only Iraq or Afghanistan that the US intends to force into submission, even after the invasion of Poland, France and Britain managed “the phoney war”, with the hope that, after Poland, Hitler would turn his troops towards the Soviet Union. Too lately they realised that Hitler’s intention was to conquer all of Europe, if not the entire world.

Documents published in 1969, including the full protocol of the conversations between Chamberlain and Hitler prove that Chamberlain thanked the Fuhrer “for his clear presentation of Germany’s position.” The beginning of the ultimate tragedy of human history is similar to World War II in many ways. The beginning then was best expressed by Chamberlain as an “Anglo-German understanding” for “the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism” (Sept. 13, 1938, in a letter to King George VI). The beginning today is an Anglo-American understanding against Islam, labelled as fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism in a sequence of correlations. We tend to ignore that Hitler’s “final solution” was no different than the US “infinite justice.”

The Muslim leaders’ policy of giving free hand to the US today derives naturally from their collective mindset, concerned above all of what they consider the pre-eminent threat to the security of their personal interests. For the Western leaders, the “green menace” involves as much fundamental threat to the most sacred tenets of capitalism and colonialism as the “red menace” involved. Their giving a free hand to the US for the fear of Islam is similar to the freedom handed out to Hitler as a direct overt choice of fascism over communism, which consistently rejected direct proposals by the Soviet Union to act against Germany’s aggression. Just like the US exploitation of the UN, the free hand to Hitler permitted consistent violations of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Just like the imminent genocide in Afghanistan due to bombing and starvation, the free hand to Hitler did all of this in the full knowledge of the most organized and violent repression of the human rights in history.

The European nations might console themselves with the idea that the US is out there to eradicate the threat posed by Islam, forgetting that the US is out to eradicate every resistance to the kind of domination it wants over the world. If we do not stand to say no to the US injustice now, then when? If appeasement has led to an escalation of disasters in the past, can it do otherwise in the future? Do we wait until its our turn to face the US onslaught? Our struggle now is not a struggle against a country, whose yearning for security could be satisfied or denied. We should refrain from assisting the US in killing innocent people who are not involved in any crime – nor have they been proven guilty. To postpone the ultimate tragedy of human history, we must stop all cooperation with the US, not because we are anti-American, but because such killing is wrong. We should stop it even if it meant there would be no US or Western assistance, or we might be attacked like Afghanistan.

The Crusades

Don Closson

Don Closson received the B.S. in education from Southern Illinois University, the M.S. in educational administration from Illinois State University, and the M.A. in Biblical Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. He served as a public school teacher and administrator before joining Probe Ministries as a research associate in the field of education. He is the general editor of Kids, Classrooms, and Contemporary Education.

Introduction

At the Council of Clermont in 1095 Pope Urban II called upon Christians in Europe to respond to an urgent plea for help from Byzantine Christians in the East. Muslims were threatening to conquer this remnant of the Roman Empire for Allah. The threat was real; most of the Middle East, including the Holy Land where Christ had walked, had already been vanquished. Thus began the era of the Crusades, taken from the Latin word crux or cross. Committed to saving Christianity, the Crusaders left family and jobs to take up the cause. Depending on how one counts (either by the number of actual crusading armies or by the duration of the conflict), there were six Crusades between 1095 and 1270. But the crusading spirit would continue on for centuries, until Islam was no longer a menace to Europe.There is a genuine difficulty for us to view the Crusades through anything but the eyes of a 21st century American. The notion of defending Christianity or the birthplace of Christ via military action is difficult to imagine or to support from Scripture, but perhaps a bit easier since the events of September 11th.

So when Christians today think about the Crusades, it may be with remorse or embarrassment. Church leaders, including the Pope, have recently made the news by apologizing to Muslims, and everyone else, for the events surrounding the Crusades. In the minds of many, the Crusades were an ill-advised fiasco that didn’t accomplish the goals of permanently reclaiming Jerusalem and the Holy Lands.

Are history books correct when they portray the Crusades as an invasion of Muslim territories by marauding Europeans whose primary motive was to plunder new lands? What is often left out of the text is that most of the Islamic Empire had been Christian and had been militarily conquered by the followers of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th and 8th centuries.

Islam had suddenly risen out of nowhere to become a threat to all of Christian Europe, and although it had shown some restraint in its treatment of conquered Christians, it had exhibited remarkable cruelty as well. At minimum, Islam enforced economic and religious discrimination against those it controlled, making Jews and Christians second-class citizens. In some cases, Muslim leaders went further. An event that may have sparked the initial Crusade in 1095 was the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim.{1} In fact, many Christians at the time considered al-Hakim to be the Antichrist.

We want black and white answers to troubling questions, but the Crusades present us with a complex collection of events, motivations, and results that make simple answers difficult to find. In this article we’ll consider the origins and impact of this centuries-long struggle between the followers of Muhammad and the followers of Christ.

The Causes

Historian Paul Johnson writes that the terrorist attacks of September 11th can be seen as an extension of the centuries-long struggle between the Islamic East and the Christian West. Johnson writes,

The Crusades, far from being an outrageous prototype of Western imperialism, as is taught in most of our schools, were a mere episode in a struggle that has lasted 1,400 years, and were one of the few occasions when Christians took the offensive to regain the “occupied territories” of the Holy Land.{2}

Islam had exploded on the map by conquering territories that had been primarily Christian. The cities of Antioch, Alexandria, and Carthage had been the centers of Christian thought and theological inquiry for centuries before being taken by Muslim armies in their jihad to spread Islam worldwide. Starting in 1095 and continuing for over four hundred years, the crusading spirit that pervaded much of Europe can be seen as an act of cultural self-preservation, much as Americans now see the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

One motivation for the Crusade in 1095 was the request for help made by the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I. Much of the Byzantine Empire had been conquered by the Seljuk Turks and Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world, was also being threatened. Pope Urban knew that the sacrifices involved with the call to fight the Turks needed more than just coming to the rescue of Eastern Christendom. To motivate his followers he added a new goal to free Jerusalem and the birthplace of Christ.

At the personal level, the Pope added the possibility of remission of sins. Since the idea of a pilgrim’s vow was widespread in medieval Europe, crusaders, noblemen and peasant alike, vowed to reach the Holy Sepulcher in return for the church’s pardon for sins they had committed. The church also promised to protect properties left behind by noblemen during travels east.

The Pope might launch a Crusade, but he had little control over it once it began. The Crusaders promised God, not the Pope to complete the task. Once on its way, the Crusading army was held together by “feudal obligations, family ties, friendship, or fear.”{3}

Unlike Islam, Christianity had not yet developed the notion of a holy war. In the fifth century Augustine described what constituted a just war but excluded the practice of battle for the purpose of religious conversion or to destroy heretical religious ideas. Leaders of nations might decide to go to war for just reasons, but war was not to be a tool of the church.{4} Unfortunately, using Augustine’s just war language, Popes and Crusaders saw themselves as warriors for Christ rather than as a people seeking justice in the face of an encroaching enemy threat.

The Events

The history books our children read typically emphasize the atrocities committed by Crusaders and the tolerance of the Muslims. It is true that the Crusaders slaughtered Jews and Muslims in the sacking of Jerusalem and later laid siege to the Christian city of Constantinople. Records indicate that Crusaders were even fighting among themselves as they fought Muslims. But a closer examination of the Crusades shows the real story is more complex than the public’s perception or what is found in history books. The fact is that both Muslims and Christians committed considerable carnage and internal warfare and political struggles often divided both sides.Muslims could be, and frequently were, barbaric in their treatment of Christians and Jews. One example is how the Turks dealt with German and French prisoners captured early in the First Crusade prior to the sacking of Jerusalem. Those who renounced Christ and converted to Islam were sent to the East; the rest were slaughtered. Even Saladin, the re-conqueror of Jerusalem was not always merciful. After defeating a large Latin army on July 3, 1187, he ordered the mass execution of all Hospitallers and Templars left alive, and he personally beheaded the nobleman Reynald of Chatillon. Saladin’s secretary noted that:

He ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and Sufis . . . [and] each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.{5}

In fact, Saladin had planned to massacre all of the Christians in Jerusalem after taking it back from the Crusaders, but when the commander of the Jerusalem garrison threatened to destroy the city and kill all of the Muslims inside the walls, Saladin allowed them to buy their freedom or be sold into slavery instead.{6}

The treachery shown by the Crusaders against other Christians is a reflection of the times. At the height of the crusading spirit in Europe, Frederick Barbarossa assembled a large force of Germans for what is now known as the third Crusade. To ease his way, he negotiated treaties for safe passage through Europe and Anatolia, even getting permission from Muslim Turks to pass unhampered. On the other hand, the Christian Emperor of Byzantium, Isaac II, secretly agreed with Saladin to harass Frederick’s crusaders through his territory. When it was deemed helpful, both Muslim and Christian made pacts with anyone who might further their own cause. At one point the sultan of Egypt offered to help the Crusaders in their struggle with the Muslim Turks, and the Turks failed to come to the rescue of the Shi’ite Fatimid Muslims who controlled Palestine.

Human treachery and sinfulness was evident on both sides of the conflict.

The Results

On May 29, 1453 the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II. With it the 2,206-year-old Roman Empire came to an end and the greatest Christian church in the world, the Hagia Sophia, was turned into a mosque. Some argue that this disaster was a direct result of the Crusaders’ misguided efforts, and that anything positive they might have accomplished was fleeting.Looking back at the Crusades, we are inclined to think of them as a burst of short-lived, failed efforts by misguided Europeans. Actually, the crusading spirit lasted for hundreds of years and the Latin kingdom that was established in 1098, during the first Crusade, endured for almost 200 years. Jerusalem remained in European hands for eighty-eight years, a period greater than the survival of many modern nations.

Given the fact that the Latin kingdom and Jerusalem eventually fell back into Muslim hands, did the Crusaders accomplish anything significant? It can be argued that the movement of large European armies into Muslim held territories slowed down the advance of Islam westward. The presence of a Latin kingdom in Palestine acted as a buffer zone between the Byzantine Empire and Muslim powers and also motivated Muslim leaders to focus their attention on defense rather than offense at least for a period of time.

Psychologically, the Crusades resulted in a culture of chivalry based on both legendary and factual exploits of European rulers. The crusading kings Richard the Lionheart and Louis IX were admired even by their enemies as men of integrity and valor. Both saw themselves as acting on God’s behalf in their quest to free Jerusalem from Muslim oppression. For centuries, European rulers looked to the Crusader kings as models of how to integrate Christianity and the obligations of knighthood.

Unfortunately, valor and the ability to conduct warfare took precedent over all other qualities, perhaps because it was a holdover from Frankish pagan roots and the worship of Odin the warrior god. These Germanic people may have converted to Christianity, but they still had a place in their hearts for the gallant warrior’s paradise, Valhalla.{7} As one scholar writes:

But the descendants of those worshippers of Odin still had the love of a warrior god in their blood, a god of warriors whose ultimate symbol was war.{8}

The Crusades temporarily protected some Christians from having to live under Muslim rule as second-class citizens. Called the dhimmi, this legal code enforced the superiority of Muslims and humiliated all who refused to give up other religious beliefs.

It is also argued that the crusading spirit is what eventually sent the Europeans off to the New World. The voyage of Columbus just happens to coincide with the removal of Muslim rule from Spain. The exploration of the New World eventually encouraged an economic explosion that the Muslim world could not match.

Summary

Muslims still point to the Crusades as an example of injustice perpetrated by the West on Islam. An interesting question might be, “Had the situation been reversed, would Muslims have felt justified in going to war against Christians?” In other words, would the rules in the Qur’an and the Hadith (the holy books of Islam) warrant a conflict similar to what the Crusaders conducted?You have probably heard the term jihad, or struggle, discussed in the news. The word denotes different kinds of striving within the Muslim faith. At one level, it speaks of personal striving for righteousness. However, there are numerous uses of the term within Islam where it explicitly refers to warfare.

First, the Qur’an permits fighting to defend individual Muslims and the religion of Islam from attack.{9} In fact, all able bodied Muslims are commanded to assist in defending the community of believers. Muslims are also given permission to remove treacherous people from power, even if they have previously agreed to a treaty with them.{10}

Muslims are encouraged to use armed struggle for the general purpose of spreading the message of Islam.{11} The Qur’an specifically says, “Fighting is a grave offense, but graver is it in the sight of Allah to prevent access to the path of Allah, to deny Him, to prevent access to the Sacred Mosque. . . .”{12} Warfare is also justified for the purpose of purging a people from the bondage of idolatry or the association of anything with God. This gives the Muslim a theological reason to go to war against Christians, since the Qur’an teaches that the doctrine of the Trinity is a form of idolatry. Had the situation been reversed, the religion of Islam provides multiple rationalizations for the actions of the Crusaders.

But is there a Christian justification for the Crusades? The only example of a Christian fighting in the New Testament is the apostle Peter when he drew his sword to protect Jesus from the Roman soldiers. Jesus told him to put the sword away. Then He said, “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and He will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” The kingdom that Jesus had established would not be built on the blood of the unbeliever, but on the shed blood of the Lamb of God.

The Crusader’s actions should be defended using Augustine’s “just war” language rather than a holy war vocabulary. Although they did not always live up to the dictates of “just war” ideals, such as the immunity of noncombatants, the Crusades were a last resort defensive war that sought peace for its people who had been under constant assault for many years.

If one of the functions of a God-ordained government is to restrain evil and promote justice, then it follows that rulers of nations where Christians dwell may need to conduct a just war in order to protect their people from invasion.

Countries currently on the list

Iran – Added in 1984. According to the State Department, “continued to provide Lebanese Hizballah and the Palestinian rejectionist groups—notably Hamas, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP-GC—with varying amounts of funding, safe haven, training, and weapons. It also encouraged Hizballah and the rejectionist Palestinian groups to coordinate their planning and to escalate their activities.”

Libya – On May 15, 2006, the United States announced that Libya will be removed from the list after a 45-day wait period. [3] Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained that this was due to “…Libya’s continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism,”.[4]

Afghanistan has never been on the list, although a 2001 report from the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism declared that “Taliban-controlled Afghanistan remains a primary hub for terrorists.”[5] This is because the United States did not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.